26 United States The EconomistJuly 13th 2019
21dent Vladimir Putin bemoans the absence
of practical moves from the Americans, de-
spite Mr Trump’s earlier expressions of in-
terest. Talks need to start now, Mr Putin
told the Financial Timeslast month, to set-
tle matters in time. If the treaty ceases to
exist, he said, “there would be no instru-
ment in the world to curtail the arms race.”
Worse, each side would be left blind.
Without a start extension America and
Russia “will be without on-the-ground in-
sight into each other’s nuclear forces for
the first time in about 50 years, which is in-
credibly dangerous”, says Alexandra Bell of
the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Pro-
liferation, a think-tank. The verification re-
gime enables policymakers to plan with
confidence. A former official involved in
negotiating the treaty says it would cost
“multiple billions of dollars per year” to
gather the intelligence by other means.Arms and Influence
Why would Mr Trump give this up? It is not
for lack of interest in arms control. As far
back as 1986 he is said to have wanted to ask
Reagan to let him negotiate a nuclear deal
and quickly end the cold war. Now he sees
an Obama accord and believes he can do
better. He envisages not just a bilateral deal
with Russia, but a broader one involving
China and perhaps others, embracing all
weapons systems. He has asked his admin-
istration to explore this.
In theory this makes sense. Bilateral nu-
clear deals had a logic during the cold war,
but Mr Bolton has argued that in today’s
multipolar nuclear world that is “concep-
tually completely backward”. American of-
ficials expect China’s arsenal to double
over the next decade. Arms-control advo-
cates agree that hypersonic weapons and
cyber capabilities pose new threats. “We’re
facing an international security crisis in
the arms-control arena as technologies are
outpacing the diplomatic and legal frame-
works that in the past served us well in nuc-
lear and chemical and biological weapons,”
says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms
Control Association in Washington, dc.
In practice, though, Mr Trump’s ap-
proach looks hopeless. For one thing, Chi-
na shows no interest in it. It has a nuclear
arsenal of only 290 warheads, compared
with America’s 6,185 and Russia’s 6,500, ac-
cording to the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute. It sees no reason
to submit to limits just yet. And if numbers
fell much more Russia would want French
and British weapons included in the mix.
Arms-control experts doubt that the
Trump administration has the bandwidth
to conduct serious negotiations with the
Russians, Chinese and North Koreans at
the same time. (The State Department of-
fice responsible for handling nuclear disar-
mament has shrunk from 14 people to four
during Mr Trump’s presidency, the Guard-ian recently reported.) They detect no strat-
egy for conducting such a complex negoti-
ation. Besides, they view Mr Bolton as a
wily operator who hates arms control,
which he sees as constraining America.
Under George W. Bush in 2001 he helped to
pull America out of the Anti-Ballistic Mis-
sile Treaty; in his current role he has seen
off the Iran deal and the inf treaty. The sus-
picion is that he is using the idea of a bigger
deal as a diversion to kill New start.
Some would like to see New start ex-
tended first, thus retaining its precious
verification provisions, before moving on
to a broader arms-control effort, which
could take years. They believe both sides’
concerns over an extension could be quick-
ly sorted out if there was clear political di-
rection from the top (on that Mr Bolton
agrees: “if you really want to negotiate, you
can do it fast,” he told Free Beacon). Pres-
sure is starting to come from Congress. In
May leaders of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee introduced a bipartisan bill
urging the Trump administration to retain
the limits on Russia’s nuclear forces until- Mr Trump could yet find himself vul-
nerable to attack on the nuclear issue by
Democratic candidates for his job.
He also risks a rough ride at the five-
yearly review conference, next spring, of
the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (npt).
It will be an acrimonious affair if the nuc-
lear powers are not seen to be doing their
bit to contain the spread of weapons. There
is already a deep split over the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, approved
by the unGeneral Assembly in 2017, which
seeks to delegitimise nukes. “If the United
States and Russia can’t show up in 2020
and at least say we’ve extended New start,
and hopefully say we’ve extended and are
engaged in further discussion, we’re going
to be in bad shape,” says Lynn Rusten of the
Nuclear Threat Initiative, an advocacy
group in Washington, dc.
Erosion of the npt could give more
countries an excuse to join the nuclear
club. The number of nukes in the world has
come down, but could swell again in the
absence of controls or trust. Alexey Arba-
tov, from the Institute of World Economy
and International Relations in Moscow, be-
moans a lack of understanding of the his-
tory of nuclear arms control among the
world’s leaders today. That could result in
miscalculation. “Saving the inftreaty and
start while there is still time would be
much easier and more productive than
searching for palliatives after their de-
mise,” he concludes in the current issue of
Survival, the journal of the International
Institute for Strategic Studies.
Time, though, is running out. Finding a
way to re-engage with Russia before it is
too late will not be easy. But it would prob-
ably matter more than those steps across
the border at Panmunjom. 7
T
he indictmentof Jeffrey Epstein on
charges of sex-trafficking described a
pyramid scheme for the sexual abuse of
minors. Mr Epstein would pay hundreds of
dollars apiece for sexual encounters with
adolescent girls at his mansion in Manhat-
tan’s Upper East Side and then pay them to
recruit other underage girls. When police
searched the residence they uncovered
hundreds of pictures of nude, young-look-
ing women—some on cds kept in a locked
safe with names like “Misc nudes 1” and
“Girl pics nude”. Three personal employees
apparently aided in the scheme. This is all
revolting, but it is hardly a great surprise.
More than a decade ago police and pros-
ecutors stumbled across a similar pattern
of conduct in Palm Beach, Florida, where
Mr Epstein owns another mansion. In a lat-
er civil case, the victims alleged that hun-
dreds of young girls had been abused. Yet
Mr Epstein got off remarkably lightly. His
plea deal, which was not first shown to the
victims as required by federal law, included
charges of “soliciting prostitution” from a
girl as young as 14 (and thus well below the
state age of consent). He received a sen-
tence of 18 months, of which he served 13
months in the private wing of a county jail.
Mr Epstein was released for six days out of
the week to go to work. Harsher sentences
are doled out for forging a check.
The case has thus come to symbolise
something larger, about unequal justice for
those with the right connections, or whoWASHINGTON, DC
A soft plea deal does not necessarily
point to incompetence or corruptionProsecuting Jeffrey EpsteinAcosted